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This paper addresses an overlooked perspective in the literature and practice of online journalism education: an explicit connection in educational approaches and handbooks between scholarly work on online journalists, and conceptual publications regarding the change role of professional journalism online. The authors come to this issue from the perspectives of research and educational practices in their respective countries: Flanders, Germany and The Netherlands. By coupling the results from surveys among online journalists in these countries with emerging approaches in online newsrooms as well as online journalism education programs, the authors find that most educational programs do not embrace an innovative role regarding online journalism, and generally tend to focus on a strictly vocational and technological approach in teaching. While online journalists seem to be facing particular challenges regarding new roles, relationships with audiences and journalists from “offline” media, and ethical dilemmas, education seems to be geared towards using new media on top of existing practices. The authors argue that a more conceptually rigorous approach towards teaching online or even multimedia journalism is called for on the basis of both empirical and theoretical work on journalism and new media.
Deuze et al. (Sun,) studied this question.